I just cooked ground meat by myself!! ...

Omg, my cooking skills have again increased.

A unforgettable day in my life, so let me show you a couple of pictures. Can't believe I'm in my last semester in the bachelor and just learned how to cook meat. Honestly I don't know how I survived the last years without eating meat at all.

The ingredients: green bell pepper, taco seasoning, lean ground beef-pork mix

Thanks cquek.com for giving me the code to arrange my pictures horizontal

Some pictures... sadly the flash makes the pictures look less appetizing... ( ;︶︿︶;)

Just put the ground meat in the pan.

Added green bell pepper.

Added taco seasoning.

I'm aware this is not the fanciest dinner you've ever seen, but still it was really good (and simplier than I thought it would be.)

I definitely want to cook more meat and explore other ways to season it (cuz I know taco seasoning is not a regular option even though it's so good.)

And of course, thanks to my mother who answered all the questions I asked her.（≧▼≦ ;）

Have a nice day~

Sammi & Soupe Dumplings

Today, my sister and I went to Sammi & Soupe Dumplings to eat xiaolongbao 小笼包 (or soupe dumplings.)

She had been there one time before and told me it was good. I'm no xiaolongbao expert, but I thought they were indeed excellent!

We took steamed chicken and coriander xiaolongbao (classic but so good anyway). They also have appetizers, soups, and fried dumplings.

It was my first time eating xiaolongbao. From what I've read on the internet, you're supposed to take it with your chopsticks, dip it in the sauce, put it on your spoon, take a bite and suck up the juice, and then just eat it normally.

Look at all that juice. Mmm~~

Also, the place looks really clean. We can actually see the kitchen and the workers making the dumplings because it's just a big transparent window. For more pictures, you can go there.

Fortune cookie

Great.

Cooking Beef~~

Heya,

Since I started this blog and posted some recipe experimentations I did, you may have read numerous times I don't dare making meat dishes cuz I'm scared to have food poisoning.
But tonight I finally decided to cook meat at the rez (aka the school dorms).
I've been thinking about that for a while after I ate some fried rice a Taiwanese student gave me (and made herself). It had beef in it and it was really good.

It doesn't look that good-looking on this picture, but it was delicious nonetheless.

And I'm just really tired to only eat pasta dishes and rice.

Not really an interesting nor useful post, but still marks an 'important' time in my dorm life. haha (and in my life in general cuz it's the first time I'm cooking meat by myself) >o<

My mother told me to buy beef strips like this so

I just listened to her advice.. haha

The setup (without the knife).

I started to cut the strips but then I saw it was brown-grey on the inside...

Asked my mom about that; she told me it's only because they were stuck together in the packaging. But nothing to be worrying about.

lol if it seems like some pieces are missing it's cuz

I ate some while they were cooking owo

It was so simple to cook... I was really surprised. And so easy to cut and just put in a frying pan.

But the taste was.. bland. And sadly it did not taste at all like the beef in the fried rice made by the Taiwanese student. Maybe she cooked her beef with sesame oil? (I used butter).

And now that I look at her fried rice on the picture, I think she had bought smaller beef pieces/cut the beef pieces smaller. I really don't know. But it's still edible (although I guess I can only confirm this tomorrow after a couple of hours of digesting this lool) so I will obviously eat it and enjoy eating meat. Just next time I'll probably try with sesame oil and cutting the strips in thinner pieces.

Bye!

11.02.2016: Didn't got sick. ;D

(v. 2.0) Eggplants (Chinese style) 鱼香茄子

To see v. 1.0 click here
(or it's just the post under this one) (~￣▽￣)~

Hallooooo~~

I did a cooking fail today. >v<
Yeah, it's about the eggplants. I gave them a second try today.
I wanted to because a few weeks ago, a good language partner of mine gave me an amazing site where they have all kinds of Chinese recipes (and not only Chinese, he also told me there were European recipes, even though I can't find them on the site..)
It's called Meishij. I think it's a goldmine.
For some reason, it reminds me of Recettes du Québec. I made a lot of desserts from recipes of this site when I was younger, and most of them turned out excellent.
The site is only in Chinese, but there are pictures to help you and there's always Google translate.

Anywho, I searched for some eggplants recipes on the site, and found this one.
From the pictures, it looked a lot like the ones I had in Taiwan. And the recipe seemed simple.
Actually it was more of a disaster.

I'm not even gonna describe the steps cuz I believe it was on the limit of being edible and I don't want you to do the same steps as I did (actually I just wanted to post the pictures to show my fail.)

Well, first, my dish really doesn't look like the one in the recipe. Mine looks like my mother's chop suey. I got nothing against chop suey, but.. heh. I guess I didn't use the same kind of eggplant as in the original recipe (but I've only seen one kind of eggplant here in my life, and it's the one I used).

As for the taste: quite spicy (because of the 豆瓣酱 doubanjiang) but except the spiciness, taste is very bland. First try eggplants tasted way better.

Thing is, I don't even know where in the recipe I made a mistake. >∀<

I did left the eggplant overnight on the counter because I had bought it yesterday (at about 6 pm), so maybe I should have cooked the eggplant right away when I bought it.

And I'm sorry for the ugly watermarks on my pictures. Photofiltre has not been very nice with me for a while; it doesn't want to open certain pictures. So I have to use Gimp 2 to make my watermarks, and I'm such a noob with this editor.
I'm gonna end this sad post with somewhat of a nice picture of my eggplants... doesn't look that bad here at least.

But this experience will not really keep me from trying other recipes on Meishij. So it's all good.

Eggplants (Chinese style) 鱼香茄子

Hello (and Happy New Year 2016!),

A couple of days ago, I made Chinese style eggplants. I don't really know what to call them, so let's refer to them as Chinese style eggplants in English. In Chinese, it's called 鱼香茄子 (yú xiāng qiézi). 鱼香 is like 'fish flavoured/aroma'. I didn't search on the web, but I don't really understand why there is 鱼香 in the name, maybe some people use fish sauce, I really have no idea.
The more I 'researched' on the recipe, the more I think it's a pretty flexible dish. Everyone seems to have their own style of cooking them.

The first time I ate them, it was in Taiwan. Here is a picture of the dish:

It tasted salty (but not too much), like chicken broth. It wasn't spicy at all. It was like comfort food. I ate it with rice and the broth (?) is reaaaallyyyy good with the rice. (ﾟヮﾟ)

It is only a couple of months ago that I thought of asking a Taiwanese student what was the name of this dish. She told me it was 鱼香茄子 (I call it Chinese style eggplants). She gave me a recipe she wrote herself in French on how to make them. It was so sweet.
I only tried the recipe during the Christmas holidays since I was home at that time (and I had the kitchen).

Just as I started cutting the eggplant, I discovered eggplants have seeds... (I think I ate eggplants one time in my life, and I don't recall them having seeds at that moment...)

So I checked on the internet if you needed to remove them. I was so hoping to not need to (though as you can see on the picture, I did started to try to remove the seeds by trying a fancy cut on the eggplant, but then I saw there were seeds even near the skin, so I just went to look up on the web cause I didn't want to cut all this for nothing).

And in fact, you don't need to remove them. It would have been kind of a hassle if you had, in my opinion..

Ingredients:

Basil leaves, garlic, jalapeño peppers (didn't put in the seeds thank God), 1 eggplant

Garlic and hot pepper with oil.

Adding the eggplant.

After 3 minutes of cooking/steaming (with pot cover) on medium-heat.

After adding soy sauce, sugar, water and salt.

Final result.

It definitely did not taste like the ones I had eaten in Taiwan. Nonetheless, it was good. If only I had put less jalapeño peppers. I never cook with hot peppers, but when I do...

Also, the recipe called for two eggplants, but I decided to cook just one, because it looked enough. Didn't know eggplants were like spinach and shriveled like crazy.

But because it didn't taste like the eggplants I had eaten in Taiwan, I asked another Chinese person if the dish on the (first) picture was really Chinese style eggplants. He told me yes, and that there were a lot of variations of this dish. Well, in fact, after looking up Chinese style eggplants on the net, I found that each recipe had something different from the other, but all in all, same basic ingredients.

I will of course try other recipes of these eggplants until I find ze one.

See ya :)

Dumplings: Take 2 & 3

Hi,

So these past days, I've made vegetarian dumplings. I'm not vegetarian, but I don't think I can cook meat successfully and I want to avoid food poisoning.
But it's all good, because this makes me eat a good amount of vegetables (I barely eat vegetables during school semester... especially this semester was kinda weird.. o_e)

I followed this recipe I found on the internet. Thank you.
I substituted some vegetables in the recipe for others I could more easily find here.
Also I used gyoza wrappers because I prefer thinner wrappers, and didn't cook them the same way.
(I boiled them)

Here are pictures \^o^/
(by the way, take one is here)

TAKE TWO

Vegetables I used:

Spinach, carrots, celery, enoki mushrooms and green onions

My filling. Tasted good.

Several dumplings exploded that time...

... But others turned out pretty good!

Also fried them.

Ended up burning them. -.-

TAKE THREE

Because I still had celery, carrots and green onions, I decided to make the recipe again. I think it tasted pretty good. Of course, it's not as good as when you put meat in them (I like eating meat), but it's a recipe worth taking the time to chop all of these veggies.

Vegetables used:

Spinach, carrots, green onions, celery, white mushrooms

Added noodles because the filling was a bit too liquid.

You can see the ends of the gyoza pastries starting to become dry...

>o<

Boiled too long!

Next batch was better~

Top plate though..

Frying :)

I don't really feel like writing a lot...

I had planned to write a couple of things on here during the Christmas holidays, but somehow didn't really follow my plans.

Anyway, byebye.

Merry belated Christmas and happy early New Year 2016. :)

Chinglish and Chinçais

Since I've been learning Chinese, I've come across a couple of Chinese words that sound phonetically almost the same as English, and thought it was pretty cool, but never really dwelled on them (although all remembered them cuz they're easy to).

The more I came across words as such, the more I got interested. There were also more "complex" expressions such as 'Good morning' or 'I love you', which is quite funny. Although I do know Japanese, Korean, and other languages also use the English phonetic for some of their words, I still find Chinglish (and Chinçais) really cute.

Here are some words like such, most of them are in English but there are also some in French. I will try to update this list whenever I learn new ones. Some of the words have been told to me by Chinese, so thanks to them. Other that that, I found these words randomly whether by tv shows, reading, listening to music, or the teacher told us. And there are words I learned from yourmandarin on Instagram. I love how they explain each word within their context and provide a lot of examples.
Also, I haven't included the countries/proper nouns since they sound similar pretty much everywhere.

* February 12nd 2017 *: lmao I just learned these are called loanwords. I called them Chinglish all that time (even though I knew it wasn't exactly Chinglish but I didn't have any other words to describe it.) Also there are already lists of loanwoards in Chinese on the internet lawl.
I created a google spreadsheet, where the nouns are on the first sheet and the expressions on the second sheet.

ACCESS TO THE GOOGLE SHEET : HERE